The present invention is generally directed to an incident management system and method for allowing one or more incident managers to account for resources, emergency responders, volunteers, victims, and evacuees at the scene of an incident.
Incidents may arise from a natural disaster (i.e., tornado, earthquake, flood, etc.), emergency situations (i.e., hazardous material spills, fires, traffic accidents, plane crashes, etc.), or from terrorist activity. Nearly every fire department or other emergency responder department faces the problems of accounting for its personnel and resources at the scene of such incidents as well as knowing the status and location of personnel and resources not currently at the scene.
Previously, to account for its personnel at a scene of an emergency, a fire department might require firefighters reporting to a scene to report to an incident commander who would assign the firefighter to a particular sector or subsector of the emergency site. Ideally, the incident commander will decide which sector of the scene to assign the firefighter based upon the firefighter's training and experience. However, when dealing with a number of volunteer firefighters or firefighters from other districts or departments, the incident commander may not know the level of training and experience of the reporting firefighter. As a result, firefighters may inadvertently be placed at risk of serious injury. The incident commander may expose himself or herself and the fire department to a liability suit should a firefighter be injured after being assigned to a sector having a particular type of fire that the firefighter is not qualified to fight.
Additionally, an incident commander would ideally know which firefighters are assigned to each sector or subsector of the emergency site and would also know when and how long the firefighters have been located in their assigned sectors. By knowing which firefighters are assigned to which sectors, the incident commander can more effectively assign and reassign firefighters to the various sectors. Further, by knowing when and how long a firefighter has been within a particular sector, the incident commander can determine whether a particular firefighter has been in the particular sector for too long and whether the firefighter should be reassigned for temporary rehabilitation (rehab). Additionally, the fire department or medical personnel may determine how long a particular firefighter was exposed to toxic fumes in order to determine the best course of treatment for the firefighter. Unfortunately, the only way for the fire department to keep such records was to manually maintain a notebook including this information. Such notebooks are impractical to maintain at the scene of an emergency where there may be excessive smoke and water that could damage the notebook. Furthermore, not only does making the necessary entries into the notebook take a substantial amount of time, but the time required to subsequently look up the desired information makes the use of notebooks even more impractical.
The problems relating to firefighter accountability and record-keeping on the scene have been magnified greatly in the recent past due to regulations put on fire departments by state and federal occupational safety and health administrations (OSHA). When assigning firefighters to various sectors and subsectors, an incident commander would certainly benefit by having more information regarding what potential dangers may be present in each sector and subsector in order to ensure that the firefighters assigned to the sectors and subsectors are qualified to deal with these potential dangers. For example, if an incident commander knew that a particular subsector of a building contained certain hazardous materials, the incident commander could assign firefighters to this subsector who are qualified to deal with those hazardous materials.
In view of the inherent danger in fighting fires or otherwise responding to other incidents, the odds that a firefighter shall require medical attention are higher than usual. Therefore, it would be desirable to maintain the medical history of each firefighter at the site. However, maintaining and transporting documentation having this information presents additional burdens upon the fire department. This problem is amplified when numerous volunteers and firefighters from other districts are called to the scene of an emergency.
The assignee of this application has addressed the above problems using computerized accountability systems. Such systems are disclosed in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,596,652 and 5,793,882. In these systems, the responders report to the scene with a portable machine-readable ID that not only identifies the responder but also includes the responder's qualification information. This information is read and stored in a computer by the incident command and is used to assign the responder to a task or sector based upon the responder's qualifications. The responder's time in a particular sector may then be monitored and recorded.
Incidents may constitute mass casualty incidents, which represent a major logistical challenge for emergency response personnel who must locate, triage, treat, stage, transport, and deliver numerous victims to medical facilities or a morgue. To address these challenges, the assignee of this application developed a system for tracking victims of a mass casualty incident. An example of such a system is disclosed in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,761,312.
The Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks highlighted various deficiencies in how emergency or civilian responders to, or victims of, a large-scale incident are tracked at the scene of an incident. In general, such tracking has been required for both logistics and site security. The current state-of-the-art had been to login personnel or victims at one or more staging points. At login, a record of the person had been created either using pencil and paper or a computerized log. A temporary ID had then been issued or a designator (e.g., color sticker, grease pen markings) applied to a pre-existing ID to indicate the status of a person (e.g., approved to be on-site, triage status, etc.). That method was time-consuming, non-standardized and prone to human error. To address these issues, the assignee of the present invention developed a new system that reads the responder's identification and qualification information and then generates an incident-specific credential that is subsequently read by portable data terminals dispersed at various locations at the large-scale incident. An example of that system is disclosed in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 7,191,934.